I'm Too [Silly] For My Shirt

St. Patrick's Day shirts were unfortunately one of those attempts to cheer myself up that ended in tears. It seemed like the perfect activity to distract and engage me, but after 3 successful t-shirt making projects I changed it up a bit and had some hiccups.

I started making shirts for the kids last St. Patrick's Day. I thought it went well. They wore them and I got pictures, mission accomplished. I hadn't realized before undertaking that project that those white Gerber onesies have to be stretched out really well before you add the image. Obviously you can see from the picture it came out fine, but it didn't last the day.

In between this St. Patty's and the last one I did the Valentines shirts this year. They worked out well. The issues I had were finding toddler sized shirts to begin with (I went to 5 stores) and the dark red background was pretty, but problematic. In the end they were simple enough to make and a big hit.

This year for Isaac's shirt I found a drawing of a Leprechaun trap. We've always made traps, but this year it was a school assignment. His shirt and Leprechaun trap came out great. No problems or tears.

Close-up before I embellished it
Almost finished
All done and modeled by the expert Leprechaun trapper himself
The Trap

The trap included pennies sprayed with gold paint (by Dad of course)as bait underneath a net (my dishwasher basket) balanced on a rainbow pole. The sign on the front said "Go Away Leprechauns" a little cleverly applied reverse psychology.

It was Riley and her best friend's shirts that gave me trouble from the get go. I was able to find 3T shirts at Joanne's early in March. I also decided I wanted to do some pretty, girly ribbon around the collars. I found beautiful sheer green ribbon with flowers stitched down the center. Of course I didn't notice it was Disney brand Tinkerbell ribbon until I saw that it was $6 A yard (gulp). It was beautiful though. So armed with shirts, ribbon, puffy paint and an idea for a girly shirt I set to work.

I found a beautiful shamrock with a bow tied around the steam for the main image. I decided to write Mommy's Little Leprechaun in another shade of green. The first trouble came when the printer spit out the whole image as a green blob. Apparently, you need to really stick with very large images when you did this kind of project. I had failed on that front. Also I had chosen a font to close to the color of the image. Mike patiently adjusted the color and futzed with printer until we had a usable image.

Three guesses what the next hurdle was?

Yup, the writing is backwards. Would have been nice to notice before I ironed them on to my only two white toddler-sized shirts. Apparently, I had correctly reversed the image and than Mike re-reversed it trying to make it print. Whoops.

I pressed on tearfully attaching the ribbon to the collars and trying to figure out how this could be salvaged. I admit to having a total meltdown.

I used fabric glue.
The finished collars (More on those in a minute.)

In the end it was puffy paint and a white paint pen to the rescue. We (or more accurately Mike) whited out the letters we couldn't write over and then simply wrote the correct letters over the wrong ones. They came out pretty cute. We did one in orange and one in purple. I don't have a picture of them finished and not being worn which was a mistake because when we put the shirts on the girls they wouldn't go over their heads with the ribbon intact. I had forgotten to stretch the collar before I glued the ribbon. I had to tear it off to get the shirts on.

All's well that ends in cute happy babies, I suppose.